It's nothing to do with the politicians. It's the advertisers and their under-table back-handers. A lowly oik is promised a non-executive board position at £300k/yr 4ish years down the road. She raises the issue with civil servants (job for life in the public sector, never lose their jobs when govts change) until it makes it to a committee. At this point more money comes in via promises of further non-exec income for the senior people on said committee; these people will be associated with a given party, even if they're don't hold a senior seat.

Sooner or later the corps get to buy legislation at the expense of the people. This is obviously the status quo in the US, but no Europe (yet). The retards in the UK always gripe about the House of Lords, but it's these very people that are the last bastion of sanity to tell the lower House to fuck off with this shit. Unfortunately the UK has followed the US model and set things up to reduce the peers (who have zero worries about income, wealth, education et al, for them and their family), and load up with career politicians to outvote those that see through the obvious corporate buy-the-law bullshit.

It's the only way they can fund the cost of internet surveillance. Companies like Phorm would do deep packet inspection of internet traffic for keywords, web addresses in combination with a tracking cooking UID. They would sell advertising slots to advertisers and websites. When a website requested an banner advert, Phorm would check the IP address and keywords, then provide a suitable advert if possible.

I sort of understand their point in this matter, at least partially. When money comes into play regarding whitelisting, that's where I'm having a hard time accepting ad blocking companies' actions. It's like being forced to claim a Yelp business profile so you can respond to critical comments.

What I don't have any objections against are non-profit adblocking software that let the user fully control what they see or don't see while respecting their privacy. No hidden URL tracking policies, data collection, ad whitelisting schemes or any similar nonsense. There are already a metric shitton of means to get around ad blocking software and improving user privacy at the same time.

Look, I don't need these excuses about "malware", although that, and the whole spying game, have certainly given ammunition to the users. I've hated ads since before the internet existed, and the internet once existed without ads. People have no intrinsic right to make money on the internet. The commercialization of the internet has done nothing except crowd out the people, and turned it over to corporations. Let's keep the internet free, and ad-free.

Malware is almost exclusively why I use an adblocker. I've never checked the box on Slashdot that allows them to show me ads - I'm totally fine with those, or others that are reasonably non-intrusive and safe.

I used to use NoScript, which functioned almost like an adblocker in many cases just by accident, but too much of the web these days simply breaks when I try to use it. Moreover, pure Javascript-based exploits seem to be much rarer these day, with plugins like Flash and Java the seeming to be the mor

Your idea of micro-payments has already been implemented in one form: Google Contributor [google.com]. Instead of ads, you see images of your choice displayed (like kittens), and a small equivalent payment goes to the site in question instead of ad revenue. The problem with that particular solution is that you have to stop blocking Google's ads to make it work. And of course, you're paying an ad company as a middle-man to do this, which some people may object to.

I've been thinking about the use of specially pre-designed HTML tags for advertising that allows only a limited subset of safe content - that is, no general-purpose scripting, no flash, no animation, no interactive content, only static images and text, and some additional functions to allow things that advertisers want, such as unique visitor counts, click-through rates, etc.

I'm no web expert, so I'm not sure about the feasibility of such an idea, but the general notion is to give advertisers a way to present their content in a guaranteed safe manner to as to discourage people from blocking ads based on a fear of getting infected by malware. We could even enforce maximum rendering sizes and total percentage of allowed ad space on a page on a per-user basis. If there was such an "ad" tag that had strict content requirements such that it could be safely validated by the browser, I'd be a lot more inclined to allow exceptions rather than the all or nothing hammer-like approach I feel I'm forced to take now. I understand that many sites I enjoy need ad-revenue to survive, but to be blunt, my computer's safety comes first, no matter what.

The minister is doing this on behalf of his friends in the content industry. That's the biggest problem with it - the conclusion that it's a problem was drawn because it's bad for his friends.

Or, all the opposing views didn't even bother to write to their MP because they are too lazy. Democracy is biased toward those who put in effort, you can't complain if your effort is confined solely to bitching on Internet forums.

To be completely honest, as much as I hate ads, I'm fine with the "acceptable ad" programs and the like. As long as I can still block the ads (and I can, since ABP lets you disable the acceptable ads stuff), then other people can fund ABP development and ad-supported sites. Call me selfish, but I have no problem with chumps paying for my stuff. Same thing with preinstalled crapware on PCs, I love it when other people subsidize my PC purchase when I'm just going to install a fresh OS anyways. Hell, the reaso

And if AdBlocking software is banned, then people will just figure out other ways to keep the web clean.

Or just avoid the ad-contaminated sites completely and stick to sites where the ads aren't drowning the content. It's nothing new that ads are killing information outlets. It has happened to magazines (like the Byte magazine which in the mid 80's was almost all ads) where the magazine turned from a small interesting magazine to a huge ad-book with a few articles that weren't far from being ads themselves.

It has happened to magazines (like the Byte magazine which in the mid 80's was almost all ads) where the magazine turned from a small interesting magazine to a huge ad-book with a few articles that weren't far from being ads themselves.

Yeah, I remember when Byte went from an moderately informative magazine to little more than an ad-delivery system. 100 pages per issue and 75 of them were ads. And yes, the "articles" were basically product placement devices with almost no informative content except for the recommendation to "buy this awesome product!"

PCMag went the same route, 80% ads and a few shit articles that rarely had anything interesting to say, except for John Dvorak and his weird, random habit of bolding some words that he felt we

Someone is paying them to come out with this. The Ad-industry has gone all out with its anti-adblocking initative in the last year or so.

We've seen the ab-block plus creator get co-opted [slashdot.org], likely from a combination of legal pressure, social schoomizing(lobbying), and probably some kind of attempted bribery. We're seeing more websites (e.g. Wired [slashdot.org]) explicitly shut out browsers with ab-blockers. Google and Yahoo have likewise begun to openly complain about ad-blocking technology [slashdot.org].

Well even unlike your conditions, the problems are the Ad's can be dangerous to your computer, and your privacy.I keep an Ad blocker, not because I want to deprive sites with revenue, but there are dangerous Ad's out there, ones that try to collect data on your browsing habits, run poorly written code that slows your computer down to a crawl.

If your product has adverts then adverts are part of your product. That makes YOU responsible for them. So if they annoy the ever living crap out of your users then it is YOUR fault.

So if you need adverts then take some responsibility. That means making sure you don't have adverts so obnoxious or malware ridden that your users want to block them. If the users want to block your adverts it is your fault and you have failed.

If you just want to "maximize your monetization" or simply can't be arsed to do a decent job, then you have no sympathy from me.

A newspaper would NEVER print (physically print) an ad that they hadn't reviewed first... NEVER, so why when you go to a news web site do you see ads which have not been reviewed? I know for a fact that they don't bother! Example: a local flight school had an airplane crash last year... the story the local news ran had a sidebar advert for that very same flight school. Two people died in that crash, and nobody thought: Hmmm... is this appropriate? If you can't be bothered to look at your ads, then I can't be bothered to look at them either. Add blockers won't work against self-hosted ads, so the solution is already present and obvious. Stop trying to make laws to protect your laziness! It's really not that hard to ask your editors to "flag" certain subjects as off limits for ads, and if you control the ad platform, problem solved!

When you look at other industries outside of news, the problem is the same. We've achieved the ability to track people, and therefore provide contextual advertising based on other websites I visit, but there is never any awareness about the website I'm currently visiting. Kinda like a rape counseling site with a dating app ad in the sidebar. The funny thing is, it's probably not bringing the advertiser the value they want either.

Print ads cost a lot more than web page ads. That means there's enough money to pay for an employee to look at each ad. For the big ad networks, with millions of ads being served every year, that's not possible, ever. The alternative isn't between human reviewed ads and broken auto-review, the alternative is between broken auto-review and having to get an honest job because your ad company has gone bankrupt.

In other words, the web simply can't continue as an ad driven medium. Nobody will pay enough for web

You're wrong actually. I still remember when Slashdot started and CmdrTaco put ads as images on a server on his own domain. Back then, what I heard, was that they got more money per ad because there were no middlemen and the ad was actually targeted. Now you have computer targeted ads from ad services companies who don't care a damn about each add but they make it up in volume. And it shows.

I still remember Doubleclick and Gator as well. I think Google eventually bought Doubleclick. But Gator... I dunno. I

I like the Forbes model. Ad blocking is not a long-term sustainable model. Sites that produce original content need to be funded in some way. Forbes says 'if you're not willing to see the ads here, then please don't come to our site'. I don't consider their content worth disabling the tracking blocker that I use (note: I don't block ads, I block flash and I block known tracking JavaScript. If your ads rely on that, then you're collateral damage), so I don't get past the page with the warning.

Deciding that you do value their content, but you're not willing to accept their revenue model is hypocritical. I'd be quite happy with an ad blocker that applied the Forbes model globally - if a site is too annoying, just block the entire site. For one thing, it would encourage sites to pursue alternate revenue streams, rather than assuming that the advertising bubble will keep growing forever.

Forbes says 'if you're not willing to see the ads here, then please don't come to our site'.

And thus I don't go to their site, they don't get to count my accesses as views, their 'readership' just went down in a small way.

Hell, last time I tried they delivered the 'turn off adblock' even when I had it turned off, with the goal of seeing what they considered 'minimal ads', so it seemed that they weren't interested in delivering content to me, period. Screw them.

I have 'allow acceptable ads' checked in adblock. You want to deliver ads to me? There's a program to get white listed. The primary rea

The closest example to this is a company that has door to door vacuum bed salespeople. One in every 10, when visiting a house, will pull out a sawed off twelve gauge and do a home invasion. Guess who will be sued in this case, after a few incidents of this? Yep. The vac bed company.

This is how it should be with websites. If a website has an advertiser decide to throw a malicious ad up, the website should be financially responsible for the advertiser's dealings, just like Best Buy is responsible if a co

Don't...don't even go down this path. Make your stand at "this is my computer, MY computer, and what it does with the information is receives is entirely up to me," as well as pointing out "Quite simply – if people don't pay in some way for content, then that content will eventually no longer exist" -> this man has no idea that the Internet existed before paid content, was more diverse during that time, and arguably a better place.

Even if ads were hosted on the same server of the website, and were as little as a simple jpg, people would still block them. Tracking/malware etc are just scare tactics, the real issue is people just want stuff for free.

I block ads for two interrelated reasons. First, they do something to my computer that is more than an in-line image on a web page. Second, they're visually obnoxious and make the site that I'm trying to visit unusable.

I can accept ads that are a simple still-image or simple animated image in-line on the page. The image needs to not detract from the use of the page. The image needs to not cause some kind of epileptic fit. The image needs to have content that is suitable for the site on which it is displayed and for a reasonable expectation of the age of the average user of the page.

I will not accept ads with sound, ads that hover-over content, ads that block access to content until active user-action, ads that require a significant time-delay before allowing access to content, ads that spawn a new window or tab, ads that use excessive animation, ads that resize the browser window, ads that use high-speed high-contrast color swapping, ads that are wholly inappropriate for the content of a website, ads that install anything on my computer, or ads that linger past the display of the web page on which they are associated.

I will accept ads that are essentially the electronic equivalent of newspaper ads. Those are acceptable. Those are really the only kind that are acceptable. Early-on I allowed ads. then ads started hijacking my browser, and eventually ad-delivered malware through a site that required the use of IE broke the DNS on a particular computer, and I decided that from that point forth I was not going to allow any Internet-based ads until they fixed the problem. They have not fixed the problem so I still do not allow ads.

Except that people don't block these ads. Most ABP users allow "acceptable ads," including me. Now the rough part is, due to so many bad apples, it costs money to maintain these lists and the makers of the ad blockers charge to be part of the acceptable list. That I can see as somewhat unfair. But the fact is many people (I'd venture most) wouldn't block a simple JPG.
OTOH, there is a lot of content that I *want* to pay for in additional to what I already pay for. I buy a monthly cable TV subscription

Except that people don't block these ads. Most ABP users allow "acceptable ads," including me.

Let's be frank. The ONLY reason for that is because most ABP users don't know they can block even more ads by digging for their hidden little check box and the don't exactly make it convenient or obvious. It should be opt-in, not opt-out. ABP is doing a form of extortion but since the advertisers have behaved SOOO badly I don't really care in this case.

Assumptions that I'm going to be ok with any form of advertising by default are going to be met by me with hostility. I run several ad blockers, I watch

Pretending it's people who want stuff for free is just a smear tactic. Self hosted ads would be hard enough to block (there's literally no way to differentiate them from other parts of the site) that the annoyance factor would have to be pretty high for someone to take the trouble of blocking it. In fact, if you insisted on self-hosting ads that were obnoxious and/or malicious, I'm pretty sure people would just quit going to your site rather than engaging in an unwinnable arms race with you. A win-win for e

He probably wasn't paid anything to shill for them. He was probably paid to speak at their conference though - in case you missed it the Oxford Media Convention is a convention for media companies, many of which use advertising, so he was probably doing that other thing politicians do apart from shill and just telling potential voters what they want to hear. He was also picking out the specific practice of charging for whitelists (looking at you ABP) as a protection racket (a sentiment that many Slashdott

> He described the practice of charging companies to be whitelisted as a 'modern day protection racket',

This is a little hyperbolic, but the whole ABP business model feels a little weird. But considering all the extortion from copyright holders, patent holders, trademark holders, it seems that extortion is a perfectly valid business model (as long as it doesn't involve violence)

True, but that is actually more the way it's been pitched by those opposed to the idea - both those that use ad blockers that feel it's somehow unethical or against the spirit of ad blocking and those that oppose the whole concept of ad blocking in general. Pitch it as some form of administration fee to ensure that the advertisers comply with the guidelines set down to meet the standards of the whitelist (such as these criteria [adblockplus.org] for ABP) and don't pull a fast one by switching formats once on the whitelist t

Just because I make a request to a server for content doesn't mean that I have to make additional requests to other servers to get ads. What if I use a browser like lynx or links, which is incapable of displaying most ads? Is that also piracy? Also, I'd really like to see some lawsuits against advertising providers and websites displaying ads when those ads contain malware. Someone needs to be liable for not properly vetting ads.

Just wait... someone will figure out how to embed a sound or video sequence that will compromise a smart TV, and the TV company won't have the technical chops to look for it and reject it... I guarantee it will happen, and probably within the next 10 years.

It's simple â" get people used to not being able to block content sent to them, and you'll get people who won't say boo when government-required tracking software is mandatory on any net-connected device. When people don't believe that what belongs to them is theirs, there are amazing things you can get done.

He described the practice of charging companies to be whitelisted as a 'modern day protection racket', and said: "Quite simply – if people don't pay in some way for content, then that content will eventually no longer exist

That's EXACTLY the point. I didn't agree to view advertising in exchange for the content. Nobody contacted me about the arrangement to find out how I felt about it. If their business model depends on annoying me in a way that I have the power to stop then it should surprise no one when I go ahead and stop them from bothering me. Their stupid business model is not my problem.

I suspect most people would if you paid them enough. I certainly would though my hourly rate would be considered absurdly high by any reasonable advertiser. I consider my time to be a precious resource and charge accordingly.

How about a Govt who has a backbone to say No, the public do not want Ads. I bloddy hate ads on TV and we have gone from 3min ads 3 times and hour 10 years ago to ads 5 mins into programme start, then 8 mins later we 6min ads, then 8 mins later another 6mins etc etc.

When downloading 1 hour programmes off the SKY network the progrtames are now only 35 mins of content, then we have crappy TV producers who fill the tv programs with loads of "What's coming Up" and Recaps that the 35min of content is now actually 23mins of content.

To meaningfully understand consumer backlash to advertising means we need to go back all the way to 1986. It was here, when advertisers switched from building a product to building a brand and decoupling their reliance on a product entirely. Its also worth noting many scholars reference the 80s to a period of peak consumption. we had more choices than ever, and could no longer reliably rely on quality as a metric for purchases. by the 90s manufacturers through NAFTA and CAFTA had cemented this concept of american "brand" consumption entirely. Advertising, arguably, now had to become entirely predatory.

luxury cars were no longer sold on quality and luxury, but on a brand of cultivated superiority and projection of affluence. Athletic shoes, appliances, food, you name it, suddenly became a feature of a culture you could define yourself by and not a product you were actually seeking. "what does it do, how well does it do it" was no longer offered to be considered. And as brands forced more and more lifestyle and experience into their products they began to run out of understanding of culture, or the entropy by which their brand-centric consumerism thrived.

fast forward to this foul year 2016. ads now track you, sites track you, and campaigns overtly demand your input. there are entire analytic suites and social science departments that study you like a petri dish for any semblance of clue as to what defines your wants, and how to exploit your desires. they do this because without information about who you are and what you do, the product cant be targeted to appeal to what lifestyle you can be made to desire. Be it astronaut, playboy, or racecar driver. unless the idea of brand-as-culture is dialed back, this is only going to get worse.

what we're seeing online is a revolt against the intrusiveness of ads from bandwidth to page view and browser experience, but its also a revolt against the idea of a consumer as a lab-rat

This reminds me of that ass-clown Jamie Kellner (chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting) who claimed that using your DVR to skip commercials was like stealing:

"Because of the ad skips, It’s theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn’t get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you’re actually stealing the programming."

That's odd, because I don't remember signing any contract that says I have to watch commercials.

Apparently this also applies to going to the bathroom during commercial breaks. If you do that, you're stealing!

So in response to John Whittingdale, I'll give him the exact same response I gave to Jamie Kellner, and that was, "Fuck you."

I run some ad-supported sites, and if they die off because the visitors use ad-blockers, so be it. "Them's the breaks." In short, no one owes me anything, and if my site visitors decide to use an ad-blocker, that's fine with me.

That nice BBC system you have over there has worked quite well for some time and should be emulated elsewhere.

Advertising revenue does not guarantee quality content. Far from it. A huge portion of the internet seems to have already devolved into click-bait with ads. If the choice is between that and nothing, I'll take nothing, There is still life beyond the browser.

What we in Europe call 'public broadcasters' are not all without advertising but the amount is strictly regulated and limited. For example the German 2nd channel called ZDF has no commercials past 20:00 hrs.
Yes it's costing an annual fee but compared to the US we get reasonable quality programs without a ridiculous number of breaks.

Most of anything is shite. BBC World News while not perfect has been a beacon to the world for which you should be proud. BBC was a good idea that is fixable.

We don't have much news on telly here, mostly just opinion being preached to it's respective choir and what ever the scary story of the day is. We can't seem to get enough frightening nastiness.... no matter how irrelevant.

News that is 100% supported by advertising is neither news nor public service. Never has been.

I was looking at a web site for some information that I was interested in and in the middle of my reading, the page suddenly scrolled to somewhere in the middle and started playing a video ad. I stopped the video and then spent a fair amount of time attempting to actually resume my reading at the place where I was interrupted (not extremely easy since it was a long page with lots of dense text and I had been involuntarily scrolled away from my place without warning).Just as I resumed reading, the damn ad once again scrolled me away from where I was and started playing the video again. After a few cycles of this bullshit, I decided to install an ad blocker and then went back to the page and actually managed to get the information I desired. And since it's quite frankly easier to block all ads instead of configuring the ad block to only block on certain pages, I by default block all ads. And I have no desire to go back to having ads again. My web pages load faster and I no longer have the damn ads attempting to vie for my attention.

Just as I resumed reading, the damn ad once again scrolled me away from where I was and started playing the video again. After a few cycles of this bullshit, I decided to install an ad blocker and then went back to the page and actually managed to get the information I desired. And since it's quite frankly easier to block all ads instead of configuring the ad block to only block on certain pages, I by default block all ads.

This pretty much sums it up, nice guys finish last. You don't block a site, people have a few bad experiences or get fed up and block all ads. And those battling the ad blocker with new and obnoxious ways to push ads are usually the worst of the lot. Since the serious companies can't stop other sites being dicks on the Internet, what are they do to? If you're using an ad blocker and say they should just go away, you're being a hypocrite. You want the content they provide, but not the ads. That's okay, I'd l

but I see plenty people who don't want to pay, don't want ads, they just feel entitled to get it for free.

Even worse, some people watch ads, costing precious bandwidth and server capacity to serve to them, and then they don't buy the product that's being advertised.
Even worse, companies that publish ads for their products make them a bit more expensive, and then people pay extra even if they didn't have the pleasure of watching the ads, or visit the web site they were advertised on.

In a further statement UK culture secretary John Whittingdale announced that timed security locks would be placed on every toilet door and kettle across the UK in order to prevent television viewers from doing anything other than watching adverts during commercial breaks. The locks would come on automatically as soon as a commercial break began.

"We were proposing automated handcuffs synchronised to commercial breaks be fitted to sofas and chairs at the factory," said Whittingdale. "However those foreign communists running Ikea refused to comply so we've reverted to other means to ensure people pay for their TV content."

A spokes lizard for the UK Advertising Association, when asked for comment, simply said "I'm loving' it, taste the feeling, have it your way," and slithered off to another meeting.

The secretary is right that charging companies to be whitelisted is bad (for many different reasons). But somehow he goes from that ethical conundrum about making money by lying to your customers (by not blocking ads) and making money as a middle-man (by charging advertisers) to the idea that ad-blocking itself is bad...

Is anyone making an adblock that would download all ad content and promptly send it to/dev/null instead of displaying it? Such adblock will be invisible to the server and the extra bandwidth doesn't matter much on a broadband connection.

You could probably do something like this with a proxy. Squid might even be up for the task already. Just have the proxy get all the content on the page (including ads) but have the proxy filter everything before it reaches your browser. You could even set it up in a VM that rolls itself back to a clean state periodically. The problem with doing this is that it would probably drastically increase latency. Waiting for the entire unfiltered page to load before a single bit appears on your screen isn't go

I can think of ways to approach it. Mostly by the web site pulling the ad and resending it, while sending all the tracking stuff back to the ad network. Completely invisible to the end user, it all looks like it locally hosted by the site.

The drawbacks, of course, are that the host site now has to pay for all that additional bandwidth (which is usually at least an order of magnitude more than the actual web page itself), and also they get more legal liability when they're sending out malware.

Quite simply – if people don't pay in some way for content, then that content will eventually no longer exist And that's as true for the latest piece of journalism as it is for the new album from Muse.

Yes... and protecting adverts with legislation and vilification of users will prevent sites from innovating and finding better ways for users to pay for content.

If record companies forced users to pay for music with tractors as a currency, people would quickly get fed up trying to find tractors to exchange for CDs and mp3s. The record companies then have two options: 1. go out of business, 2. find a better model for funding.... if you didn't guess already, adverts are tractors.

I can also stick with a factual analogy with music: Muse for instance gets a large part of it's funding from concerts, so an entirely feasible business model could be to give their music away for free for non-commercial use and then sell concert tickets... I wonder how sites could indirectly profit from giving away free content... That's the discussion that needs to be had.

I request a document, you send it to my computer, for free (if it's not behind a paywall of course).

Now when it's on my computer, I can do whatever I want with that document. I can delete it, I can edit it, I can keep only parts of it, and then display the result on my screen. You sent me the document, your control of it ends there. I can't republish it or use part of it in another publication of course, but apart from that, as long as it stays on my computer, you have no control as to what I'll do with it.

As I understand them, current adblockers don't even pull in the content from the Internet in the first place. Why not write an adblocker that gets the content, but doesn't render it to the screen? Unwanted Flash content (yes, I know, Flash is going away soon, hurray!) could be executed in a sandbox, that also isn't rendered to the user's screen. Yes, I'm advocating being very sneaky about this; I'm proposing an adblocker that, unless you're sitting in front of the browser using it, can't be detected. I'm al

Okay.. and after reading that article, the conclusion I come to, is that adblockers have nothing to do with the problem in the first place, the entire premise of online advertising is wrong and broken to start with, coupled with one simple and immutable fact about human beings: There are people who look at ads, and there are people who don't look at ads, and you can't get one to be the other regardless of how much you try. I'm a non-ad-viewer; online, if an adblocker doesn't block something, my brain is disciplined to just plain not register them anymore; even if I see it with my eyes, it doesn't make it into long-term memory. I have a TiVo DVR, and the undocumented 30-second skip function is turned on; I expertly click through commericals, and what little I see of them, 99% of the time, doesn't stick either. If, online, they started requiring a site I use to view a video advertisement all the way through before continuing on to the site? I'd either leave the room, change to a different tab, or if they were too obnoxious about it (say, for instance, they required you to interact with the ad, or it goes on playing forever) I'd just stop using the site out of frustration and disgust. Nothing is going to change my sentiments towards such things; I feel they are an abomination and I simply won't tolerate them. I know I'm far from alone in feeling that way about advertisements, too. Then there are the people who view commercials on TV as part of the entertainment. I'd imagine many of them think online ads are just fine, and actually pay attention to them. They're not going to get me, and I sure don't get them, either. However the ad-viewing types must also have a breaking point where you'd alienate them enough that they'd look elsewhere instead of enduring an overbearing ad; making ads more in-your-face than they already are isn't going to change the mind or habits of someone in my column, but it sure might drive the people in the other column away, making their 'ad revenue' problem even worse. Seems that they have limited choices in what they can do about this: They can accept the legitimate ad revenue they can get, and try to detect and exclude the fraudulent traffic, or they can risk getting more obnoxious with the ads and potentially lose their willing audience, or perhaps everything goes pay-only if you want access to a site, or they just take the loss (if they can bear it) and let people have content for free, and find some other way to get paid. Guess advertisers choices aren't really that great, but you'll excuse me for not having much sympathy for them, being one in the 'non-ad-viewing' column, who despises having anyone try to sell me anything at all, even if I might be interested.

Of course the problem goes well beyond TV and the Internet if you ask me. I can't easily estimate the amount of waste paper in my physical mailbox that goes straight into the recycle bin every month, and how offensive it is to me that money and resources are being wasted on that, and I have no way of stopping it being delivered to me; there is no 'adblocker' of any kind for your snailmailbox.:-(

After the Congestion Fee for driving in town, the Upgrade Fee for centre seats at the theatre, we now have the ridiculous idea of banning Adblockers, the last prophylactic in our arsenal against e-fections.

"Whittingdale expressed his preference for the industry to self-regulate"

Not Government regulation at all. His speech was very much targeted at his audience and I'm no fan of the opinion expressed, but he has not kicked off a government initiative to legislate against AdBlock.

It seems the powers-that-be in Britain are taking their cue from the Australian stance on science censorship [slashdot.org]. When are all these fucktards going to get over their childish 'all your marbles are belong to us' fixation? Possibly when the 'peasants' switch from the adjectival form to the verbal form of 'revolting'.

Good. This is exactly the point. The content is worthless with the obnoxious advertising baggage, tracking garbage and malware infections that comes with it. Let the worthless advertisement laden sites sink under their own weight.

What the hell happened to the UK? They've gone from a seemingly respectable place to a landmass governed by the dumbest fucking people in existence... or maybe they've always been that dumb, but the internet is allowing the stupidity to be relayed in real-time and unforgotten?

"Quite simply – if people don't pay in some way for content, then that content will eventually no longer exist. And that's as true for the latest piece of journalism as it is for the new album from Muse."

Oh yeah? So is it true for Linux? Or LibreOffice?The other day, when I downloaded the latest version of LibreOffice, I made a voluntary donation. But that was MY choice - I could download their software from now untul Kingdom Come and I wouldn't have to pay a penny.

John Whittingdale is talking sheer nonsense. Try these:

"Quite simply – if people don't pay in some way for content, then that content will eventually no longer exist. And that's as true for the latest piece of journalism as it is for the alphabet, the number system, the periodic table, the English language (and all other languages)..."

Frankly, these days I reckon that the more a piece of journalism costs to read, the less worth while reading it is.

This is another attack on the owner/user's ability to control what their computer does. Banning ad-blocking effectively means that as soon as I type a URL in and hit enter, I give unconditional control of a number of aspects of my browser over to the server, and if the author of the content on the server abuses that position, I am not allowed to do anything about it. The client/server arrangement on the web is one of trust. That trust can be abused in various ways. If a website expects ad revenue to fund itself, and users deny it that revenue, that is a problem from the point of view of the content provider, but if the website uses adverts excessively (for example so that various sites are no-go areas of you are on a mobile broadband link with a relatively small cap), then that is an abuse of the control handed to the website by the user. I long for a simple, honest web, but have no real hope of seeing much of one in the near future.

Except that they're not just charging to allow content through. They're charging to be able to pay people to actually check the content for acceptableness. People have already compared it to the various ratings organizations charging in order to rate material into the various grades.

Hell, I'll assert that I think that it's less the fee, because most companies would be willing to accept less money where they currently get no money, than it is the content rules. Not being allowed to use flash, sound, movie